The Wrong Man

1

When Scott Freeman first read the letter that he found in his daughter’s top bureau drawer, crumpled up and stuffed behind some old white athletic socks, he knew immediately that someone was going to die.

It was not the sort of sensation that he could instantly have defined, but it overcame him in much the same way that any feeling of impending dread might, finding a distinct cold place deep within his chest. He remained rooted in his place, while his eyes repeatedly traveled the words on the sheet of paper: No one could ever love you like I do. No one ever will. We were meant for each other and nothing will prevent that. Nothing. We will be together forever. One way or another.

The letter was not signed.

It had been typed on common computer paper. The type font had been italicized, to give it an almost antique sensitivity. He could not find the envelope that it had been delivered in, so there was no handy return address, not even a postmark that he could check. He put the letter down on the bureau and tried to smooth out the creases that gave it an angry, urgent appearance. He looked again at the words and tried to imagine them to be benign. A puppylike protest of love, nothing more than a temporary infatuation on the part of some college classmate of Ashley’s, a crush, and that she had kept it concealed for no real reason, other than some misplaced romantic foolishness. Really, he told himself, you are overreacting.

But nothing he imagined in that moment could overcome the sensation icing him inside.

Scott Freeman did not think of himself as a rash man, nor was he quick to anger, or prone to swift decisions. He liked to consider every facet of any choice, peering at each aspect of his life as if it were the edge of a diamond, examined under a microscope. He was an academic both in trade and nature; he wore his hair shaggy-long, to remind himself of his youth in the late sixties, liked to wear jeans and sneakers and a well-worn corduroy sports coat that had leather patches on the elbows. He wore one set of glasses for reading, another for driving, and he was always careful to have both pairs with him at all times. He kept fit by a daily dedication to exercise, often running outdoors when the weather was suitable, moving inside to a treadmill for the long New England winters. He did this, in part, to compensate for the occasions when he would drink heavily alone, sometimes mixing a marijuana cigarette with Scotch on the rocks. Scott took pride in his teaching, which allowed him a certain daily flamboyant showmanship when he looked out across a packed auditorium. He loved his field of study and looked forward to each September with enthusiasm, and little of the cynicism that afflicted many of his colleagues at the college. He thought he had the most steady of lives and feared that he put too much excitement in the details of the past, so occasionally he indulged in some contradictory behavior: a ten-year-old Porsche 911 that he drove every day unless it snowed, rock and roll blaring from the stereo. He kept a battered, old pickup truck for the winters. He had an occasional affair, but only with women near his own age, who were more realistic in their expectations, saving his passions for the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Celtics, and the Bruins, and all the college’s sports teams.

He believed that he was a man of routine, and sometimes he thought that he’d had but three real adventures in his adult life: Once, while kayaking with some friends along the rocky Maine coast, he’d been separated from his companions by a strong current and sudden fog and found himself floating for hours in a gray soup of quiet; the only noise surrounding him had been the lapping of the wavelets against the plastic kayak sides, and the occasional sucking sound of a seal or porpoise surfacing close by. The cold and damp had enveloped him, creeping closer, dimming his vision. He had understood that he was in danger, and that the extent of his trouble might be far greater than he could imagine, but he’d kept calm and waited until a coast guard boat had emerged from the vaporous mist that had enclosed him. The captain had pointed out that he’d only been yards away from a powerful offshore current that in all likelihood would have swept him seaward, and so he became significantly more frightened after his rescue than he’d been when he’d actually been at risk.

That had been one adventure. The other two were of greater duration. When Scott was eighteen and a freshman in college in 1968, he had refused to obtain a student deferment from the draft, because he felt it morally unacceptable to allow others to be exposed to dangers that he was unwilling to share. This heady romanticism had sounded high-minded at the time, but had been eviscerated by the arrival of a letter from the draft board. In short order he’d found himself drafted, trained, and on his way to a combat support unit in Vietnam. For eleven months he’d served in an artillery unit. His job had been to relay coordinates received over the radio to the fire mission commander, who would adjust the height and distance on the battery of guns, then order the rounds released with a great whooshing sound that always seemed much deeper and more profound than any thunderclap. Later, he had nightmares about being a part of killing beyond his sight, beyond his reach, almost out of his hearing, wondering, when he’d awakened in the deep of night, if he had killed dozens, maybe hundreds, or perhaps no one. He’d rotated home after a year, never once having actually fired a weapon at anyone he could see.

After his service, he’d avoided the politics that gripped the nation and delved into his studies with a single-mindedness that surprised even himself. After seeing war, or, at least, an aspect of it, history comforted him, its decisions already made, its passions reverberating in time passed. He did not speak of his time in the military and now, middle-aged and carrying a degree of tenured respect, doubted that any of his colleagues knew he’d been a part of the war. In truth, it often seemed to him as if it had been a dream, perhaps a nightmare, and he’d come to think that his year of conflict and death only barely existed.

His third adventure, he knew, had been Ashley.

Scott Freeman took the letter in his hand and went over and sat down on the edge of Ashley’s bed. It had three pillows on it, one of which, inscribed with a needlepoint heart, he’d given her on Valentine’s Day more than ten years earlier. There were also two stuffed bears, which she’d named Alphonse and Gaston, and a frayed quilt, which had been given her when she was born. Scott looked at the quilt and remembered that it had been a small joke, in the weeks before Ashley’s birth, when both her prospective grandmothers had given the child-to-be quilts. The other one, he knew, was on a similar bed, in a similar room, at her mother’s house.

His eyes traveled over the rest of the room. Photographs of Ashley and friends taped to one wall; knickknacks; handwritten notes in the flowing, precise script of teenage girls. There were posters of athletes and poets, a framed poem by William Butler Yeats that ended with the words I sigh that kiss you, for I must own, that I shall miss you when you have grown, which he’d given her on her fifth birthday, and which he’d often whispered to her as she fell into sleep. There were photographs of her various soccer and softball teams, and a framed prom picture, taken in that precise moment of teenage perfection, when her dress clung to her every newfound curve, her hair dropped perfectly to her bare shoulders, and her skin glowed. Scott Freeman realized that what he was looking out upon was the collected stuff of memories, childhood documented in typical fashion, probably no different from any other young person’s room, but unique in its own way. An archaeology of growing up.

There was one picture of the three of them, taken when Ashley was six, perhaps a month before her mother left him. It had been on a family vacation to the shore, and he thought the smiles they all wore had a helpless undercurrent to them, for they only barely masked the tension that had dominated their lives. Ashley had built a sand castle with her mother that day. The rising tide and waves poured over their every effort, washing every structure aside despite their frantic digging of moats and pushing together of sand walls.

He searched the walls and desk and bureau top, and he could see no sign of anything even the slightest bit out of place. This worried him more.

Scott looked down at the letter. No one could ever love you like I do.

He shook his head. That was untrue, he thought. Everyone loved Ashley.

What frightened him was the notion that someone could believe the sentiment expressed in the letter. For a moment, he tried again to tell himself that he was being foolish and overprotective. Ashley was no longer a teenager, no longer even a college student. She was on the verge of joining a graduate program in art history in Boston and had her own life.

It was unsigned. That meant she knew who sent her the letter. Anonymity was as strong a signature as any written name.

By the side of Ashley’s bed was a pink telephone. He picked it up and dialed her cell phone number.

She answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Dad! What’s up?”

Her voice was filled with youth, enthusiasm, and trust. He breathed out slowly, instantly reassured.

“What’s up with you?” he asked. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

A momentary hesitation.

He didn’t like that.

“Not too much. School is fine. Work is, well, work. But you know all that. In fact, nothing seems to have changed since I was home the other week.”

He took a deep breath. “I hardly saw you. And we didn’t get much chance to talk. I just wanted to make sure that everything is okay. No troubles with the new boss or any of your professors? Have you heard anything from that program you’ve applied to?”

Again, she paused. “No. Nothing really.”

He coughed once. “How about boys? Men, I guess. Anything I should know about?”

She did not immediately answer.

“Ashley?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Nothing, really. Nothing special. Nothing I can’t handle.”

He waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Is there something you want to tell me about?” he asked.

“No. Not really. So, Dad, what’s with the third degree?”

She asked this question with a lightheartedness that didn’t match his own sense of worry.

“Just trying to keep up. Your life zooms along,” he said. “And sometimes I just need to chase you down.”

She laughed, but with a slightly hollow tone. “Well, that old car of yours is fast enough.”

“Anything we need to talk about?” he repeated, then scowled, because he knew she would notice the redundancy.

She answered quickly, “No. For the second time. Why do you ask? Is everything okay with you?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

“What about Mom? And Hope? She’s okay, isn’t she?”

He caught his breath. The familiar way she used the name of her mother’s partner always took him aback, though he knew he shouldn’t be surprised after so many years.

“She’s fine. They’re both fine, I guess.”

“So what’s with the call? Something else bugging you?”

He looked at the letter in front of him.

“No, not at all. No particular reason. Just catching up. And anyway, that’s what dads do: We’re always bugged. We worry. All we can imagine are worst-case scenarios. Doom, despair, and difficulty, lurking at every turn. It’s what makes us the uniquely boring and deadly dull people we are.”

He listened to her laugh, which made him feel a little bit better.

“Look, I’m heading into the museum and we’re going to lose service. Let’s talk again soon, okay?”

“Sure. Love you.”

“I love you, Dad. Bye.”

He placed the phone back on the cradle and thought that sometimes what you don’t hear is much more important than what you do. And, on this occasion, he had heard nothing but trouble.

Hope Frazier watched the opposing team’s outside midfielder closely. The young woman tended to overplay her side of the field, leaving the defender behind her exposed. Hope’s own player, marking back closely, didn’t yet see the way she could use the risks taken by her opposite number to create a counterattack of her own. Hope paced a small ways down the sideline, thought for a moment about making a substitution, then decided against it. She removed a small pad of paper from her back pocket, seized a stub of pencil from her jacket, and made a quick notation. Something to mention in training, she thought. Behind her, she heard a murmur from the girls on the bench; they were accustomed to seeing the notebook come whipping out. Sometimes this meant praise, other times it turned into laps after the next day’s practice. Hope turned to the girls.

“Does anyone see what I see?”

There was a momentary hesitation. High school girls, she thought. One second, all bravado. The next, all timidity. One girl raised her hand.

“Okay, Molly. What?”

Molly stood up and pointed at the outside midfielder. “She’s causing us all sorts of problems on the right, but we can take advantage of her recklessness…”

Hope clapped her hands. “Absolutely!” She saw the other girls smile. No laps tomorrow. “Okay, Molly, warm up and go into the game. Go in for Sarah in the center, get the ball under control, and start something in that space.” Hope went over and sat in Molly’s spot on the bench.

“See the field, ladies,” she said quietly. “See the big picture. The game isn’t always about the ball at your feet, it’s about space, time, patience, and passion. It’s like chess. Turn a disadvantage into a strength.”

She looked up when she heard the crowd raise their voices. There had been a collision on the far sideline, and she could see a number of people gesturing for the referee to issue a yellow caution card. She could see one particularly irate father storming up and down the sideline, arms waving wildly. Hope stood up and took a few strides toward the touch line, trying to see what had taken place.

“Coach…”

She looked up and saw the nearside ref waving at her.

“I think they need you…”

She saw that the opposing team’s coach was already half-jogging across the field, and so she rapidly set forth, after grabbing a bottle of Gatorade and an emergency kit from her bag. As she made her way across, she angled herself close to Molly.

“Molls…I missed it. What happened?”

“They clashed heads, Coach. I think Vicki got the wind knocked out of her, but the other girl seems to have gotten the worst of it.”

By the time she arrived at the spot, her player was already sitting up, but the opposing team’s player lay on the ground, and Hope could hear muffled sobbing. She went to her own player first. “Vicki, you okay?”

The girl was nodding, but she had a look of fear across her face. She was still gasping for breath.

“Does anything hurt?”

Vicki shook her head. Some of the players had gathered around, and Hope dismissed them back to their positions. “Do you think you can stand up?”

Vicki nodded again, and Hope took her by the arm and steadied her as she rose. “Let’s sit on the bench for a bit,” she said calmly. Vicki started to shake her head, but Hope gripped her arm more tightly.

On the nearby sideline, the one parent had raised his voice further and was now verbally assaulting the other coach. No obscenities had spilled as yet, but Hope knew they couldn’t be far behind. She turned to the sideline.

“Let’s stay calm,” she told him. “You know the rules about taunting.”

The father shifted his glance to her. She saw his mouth open, as if to say something, then stop. For a second, he seemed about to release his anger. Then the barest restraint showed on his face, and he glared at Hope, before turning away. The other coach shrugged, and Hope heard him mutter, “Idiot” under his breath. She steered Vicki away and slowly began to escort her across the field. Vicki was still a little wobbly, but she managed to say, “My dad gets crazy.” The words were spoken with such simplicity and so much hurt that Hope understood, in that second, there was far more to that moment than a collision on the field.

“Maybe you should come talk to me about it after practice this week. Or come into the guidance office when you have a free period.”

Vicki shook her head. “Sorry, Coach. Can’t. He won’t let me.”

And there it was.

Hope squeezed the teenager’s arm. “We’ll figure it out some other time.”

This, she hoped was true. As she seated Vicki on the bench and substituted a new player into the game, she thought to herself that nothing was fair, nothing was equal, nothing was right. She glanced across the field, to where Vicki’s father stood, a little ways apart from the other parents, his arms crossed, glaring, as if counting the seconds that his daughter remained out of the game. Hope understood, in that moment, that she was stronger, faster, probably better educated, certainly far more experienced at the game. She had acquired every coaching license, attended advanced training seminars, and with a ball at her own feet, she could have embarrassed the lumbering father, dizzying him with sleight of foot and change of pace. She could have displayed her own skills, alongside championship trophies and her NCAA All-American certificate, but absolutely none of it would have made an iota of difference. Hope felt a streak of frustrated anger, which she bottled, alongside all the other, similar moments, in her heart. As she thought these things, one of her players broke free down the right and in a fast, almost imperceptible bit of skill, thundered the ball past the keeper. Hope understood, as the team jumped up and cheered at the goal, all smiles, laughter, and high fives, that winning was the one thing, and perhaps the only thing, that kept her safe.

Sally Freeman-Richards remained in her office, waiting in the October half-light, after her secretary and both her law partners had waved their good-byes and set off in the evening traffic for their homes. At certain times of the year, especially in the fall, the setting sun aggressively dropped behind the white spires of the Episcopal church on the close edge of the college campus and would flood through the windows of the adjacent offices with a blinding glare. It was an unsettled time of the year. The glare had an unwitting, dangerous quality to it; on several occasions students hurrying back from late-day classes had been hit crossing the streets by drivers whose vision had been eradicated by windshield-filling light. Over the years, she had observed this phenomenon from both sides, once defending an unlucky driver, in another instance suing an insurance company on behalf of a student with two broken legs.

Sally watched the sunlight stream through the office, carving out shadows, sending odd, unidentifiable figures across the walls. She appreciated the moment. Odd, she thought, that the light that seemed so benign could harbor such danger. It was all in where you were located, at just the wrong moment.

She sighed and thought that her observation, at least in a small way, defined much of the law. She glanced over toward her desktop and grimaced at the stack of manila envelopes and legal files that weighed down one corner. At least a half dozen were piled up, none of which were much more than legal busywork. A house closing. A workplace compensation case. A small lawsuit between neighbors over a disputed piece of land. In another corner, in a separate file cabinet, she kept the cases that intrigued her more, and which really were the underpinnings of her practice. These involved other gay women throughout the valley. There were all sorts of pleadings, ranging from adoptions to marriage dissolutions. There was even a negligent-homicide defense that she was taking second chair on. She handled her caseload with expertise, charging reasonable rates, holding many hands, and thought of herself at her best as the lawyer of wayward, misplaced emotions. That some sense of payback, or debt, was involved, she knew, but she didn’t like to be nearly as introspective about her own life as she was frequently forced to be about others’.

She seized a pencil and opened one of the boring files, then just as quickly pushed it aside. She dropped the pencil back into a jar labeled WORLD’S BEST MOM. She doubted the accuracy of this sentiment.

Sally rose, thought that there was nothing really pressing that required her to work late, and was wondering idly whether Hope was home yet, and what Hope might concoct for dinner, when the phone rang.

“Sally Freeman-Richards.”

“Hello, Sally, it’s Scott.”

She was mildly surprised to hear her ex-husband’s voice.

“Hello, Scott. I was just on my way out the door…”

He pictured her office. It was probably organized and neat, he thought, unlike the chaotic clutter of his own. He licked his lips for an instant, thinking how much he hated that she had kept his last name-her argument had been that it would be easier on Ashley as she grew up-but hyphenated in her own maiden name.

“Do you have a moment?”

“You sound concerned.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I should be. Perhaps not.”

“What is the problem?”

“Ashley.”

Sally Freeman-Richards caught her breath. When she did converse with her ex-husband, it was generally terse, to-the-point conversations, over some minor point left over from the detritus of their divorce. As the years had passed since their breakup, Ashley had been the only thing that truly kept them linked, and so their connections had been mostly the stuff of transportation between houses, of paying for school bills and car insurance. They had managed a kind of détente, over the years, where these matters were dealt with in a perfunctory, efficient manner. Little was ever shared about whom they had each become or why; it was, she thought, as if in the memories and perceptions of each, their lives had been frozen at the moment of divorce.

“What’s the matter?”

Scott Freeman hesitated. He wasn’t precisely sure how to put what was troubling him into words.

“I found a disturbing letter among her things,” he said.

Sally also hesitated. “Why were you going through her things?”

“That’s really irrelevant. The point is, I found it.”

“I’m not sure it is irrelevant. You should respect her privacy.”

Scott was instantly angered, but decided not to show it. “She left some socks and underwear behind. I was putting them in her drawer. I saw the letter. I read it. It troubled me. I shouldn’t have read the letter, I guess, but I did. What does that make me, Sally?”

Sally didn’t answer this question, although several replies jumped to her mind. Instead, she asked, “What sort of letter was it?”

Scott cleared his throat, a classroom maneuver to gain himself a little time, then simply said, “Listen.” He read the letter to her.

When he stopped, they both let silence surround them.

“It doesn’t sound all that bad,” Sally finally said. “It sounds like she has a secret admirer.”

“A secret admirer. That has a quaint, Victorian sound to it.”

She ignored his sarcasm and remained quiet.

Scott waited for a moment, then asked, “In your experience, all the cases you handle, wouldn’t you think this letter had overtones of obsession? Maybe compulsion? What sort of person writes a letter like that?”

Sally took a deep breath and silently wondered the same thing.

“Has she mentioned anything to you? About anything like this?” Scott persisted.

“No.”

“You’re her mother. Wouldn’t she come to you if she was having some sort of man trouble?”

The phrase man trouble hung in the space in front of her, glowing with electric anger between them. She didn’t want to respond.

“Yes. I presume so. But she hasn’t.”

“Well, when she was here visiting, did she say anything? Did you notice anything in her behavior?”

“No and no. What about you? She spent a couple of days at your place…”

“No. I hardly saw her. She was off visiting friends from high school. You know, off at dinner, back at two a.m., sleep to noon, and then paddle around the house until she started all over again.”

Sally Freeman-Richards took a deep breath. “Well, Scott,” she said slowly, “I’m not sure that it’s something to get all that bent out of shape about. If she’s having some sort of a problem, sooner or later she’s going to bring it up with one of us. Maybe we should give Ashley her space until then. And I don’t know that it makes much sense to assume there’s a problem before we hear that there is one directly from her. I think you’re reading too much into it.”

What a reasonable response, Scott thought. Very enlightened. Very liberal. Very much in keeping with who they were and where they lived. And, he thought, utterly wrong.

She stood up and wandered over to an antique cabinet in a corner of the living room, taking a second to adjust a Chinese plate displayed on a stand. A frown crossed her face as she stepped away and examined it. In the distance, I could hear some children playing loudly. But in the room where our conversation continued, there was nothing other than a ticktock of tension.

“How, precisely, did Scott know something was wrong?” she asked, repeating my question back to me.

“Correct. The letter, as you quote it, could have been almost anything. His ex-wife was wise not to jump to conclusions.”

“A very lawyerly approach?” she demanded.

“If you mean cautious, yes.”

“And wise, you think?” she questioned. She waved her hand in the air, as if dismissing my concerns. “He knew because he knew because he knew. I suppose you might call it instinct, but that seems simplistic. It’s a little bit of that leftover animal sense that lurks somewhere within all of us, you know, when you get the feeling that something is not right.”

“That seems a little far-fetched.”

“Really? Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about animals on the Serengeti Plain in Africa? How often the camera catches a gazelle lifting its head, suddenly apprehensive? It can’t see the predator lurking close by, but…”

“All right. I’ll go along with you for a moment. I still don’t see how-”

“Well,” she interrupted, “perhaps if you knew the man in question.”

“Yes. I suppose that might help. After all, wasn’t that the same problem facing Scott?”

“It was. He, of course, at first truly knew nothing. He had no name, no address, no age, description, driver’s license, Social Security card, job information. Nothing. All he had was a sentiment on a page and a deep-seated sensation of worry.”

“Fear.”

“Yes. Fear. And not a completely reasonable one, as you point out. He was alone with his fear. Isn’t that the hardest sort of anxiety? Danger undefined, and unknown. He was in a difficult situation, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Most people would do nothing.”

“Scott, it would seem, wasn’t like most people.”

I remained quiet, and she took a deep breath before continuing.

“But, had he known, right then, right at the beginning, who he was up against, he might have been…” She paused.

“What?”

“Lost.”